


Five times Danny watches Steve iron a shirt

by SquaresAreNotCircles



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: (and Danny Williams is a nice thing), 5 Times, Coda, Dating, Domestic, F/M, Getting Together, Humor, M/M, Steve McGarrett Deserves Nice Things, all the ships except steve/danny are off screen, h50 episode 10.16, h50 episode 10.18, ironing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-04
Updated: 2020-03-04
Packaged: 2021-02-23 06:08:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23006938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquaresAreNotCircles/pseuds/SquaresAreNotCircles
Summary: Danny watches as Steve irons peacefully, like butter wouldn’t melt. It should. The iron is hot enough for sure. “I can’t believe you,” Danny says, after a long moment of feeling strangely ignored.Or: Steve irons (and dates people). Danny has a slow revelation (and it’s not about the ironing). Everything works out smoothly, in the end.
Relationships: Steve McGarrett/Brooke Gardner, Steve McGarrett/Brooke Gardner/Emma Okino, Steve McGarrett/Danny "Danno" Williams, Steve McGarrett/Emma Okino
Comments: 65
Kudos: 357





	Five times Danny watches Steve iron a shirt

**Author's Note:**

> It’s been a really long time since I last wrote a fic from start to finish in under twenty-four hours, but then this idea came along and kept whispering “do it, do it, do it” in my ear until I did it. (Note: you probably shouldn’t listen to strange voices. Do as I say, not as I do.)
> 
> Recap/background: Brooke is the woman who has a kid at Charlie’s school that Danny set Steve up with in 10.01 and who unexpectedly resurfaced in 10.16, when Steve was going to spend Valentine’s day with her and then turned it into a group hang so he wouldn’t have to leave Danny alone. Emma is the vet Steve takes Eddie to in 10.04, and who we see again in 10.14, when she makes a house call for Eddie and Steve explains to her why he suddenly went missing after one date. In 10.18, the most recent episode as of right now, Steve tells Danny he’s going on another date with Emma.
> 
> Now, on the surface, this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, especially if you consider that in 10.14 Emma said she was dating someone else and her conversation with Steve felt more like a way to end things nicely than the start of a second try. One way to explain this would be that Steve is boldly lying to Danny about most or all of his dates (which I _love_ , not for the lying, but for all of the many reasons you could put behind it), but! There is another explanation, and it’s that Steve started out this dating thing very reluctantly when Danny pushed him into it, but he’s taking to it now and finding his groove, while Danny is left to look on and go “wait, is this what I wanted? why am I not happy about this?”, and I love that, too.
> 
> (I just. I just really, really love the idea of Steve respectfully and with full consent of everyone involved totally going for it and having the slightly wild experimental open-minded phase he never got to have at any point in his life without getting too serious about the relationships but while making sure everyone has a good time, because he’s realized a while ago that he’s not actually looking for love, seeing as he already knows he has that and exactly where to find it. (Which would be at home, grumpily waiting for him to come back from his dates so he can undergo a roasting about his dating skills, obviously.))

###### 1.

The first time, he just happens to wander into the kitchen while Steve is frowning down at the iron like it might explode if he doesn’t use it carefully. Of course, knowing Steve, there is a decent chance that he’s right. 

So they do their usual thing: Danny hops up on the kitchen counter to watch and insult Steve’s ironing skills, and it’s all painfully mundane until Steve abandons the evasive maneuvers he’s been pulling and reveals that he’s been dating Brooke an “I kinda lost count” amount of times, whatever that means. Danny carefully doesn’t explode either, and at the end of the day he’s somehow watching Love Actually with one of Steve’s arms around him while the other is around Brooke and most of their extended ohana is gathered in the room. 

Which would be fine, but Steve is not even wearing the painstakingly de-wrinkled shirt. Danny refrains from voicing that thought out loud, because Brooke is very close, but he takes Steve’s random blue T-shirt as a sign that he was right. Steve’s ironing skills deserve every insult he lobs at them.

*

###### 2.

Which is, incidentally, why he’s surprised when two weeks later he goes to check on Steve after Steve’s disappeared into the kitchen for a suspiciously long time. It’s too late for lunch and too early for dinner, so he expects not to find Steve cooking, but encountering him with the iron in his hand, attacking a different shirt, is still very intriguing. In silence, Danny pours himself a cup of coffee from the can they made earlier and settles on the counter again, in a different spot this time, with his notebook and a pen more as an alibi than because he intends to do anything with it.

Steve lasts barely thirty seconds before he’s raising a finger and snapping, “Don’t!”

Danny laughs at him, as one should.

They do their bantery thing again, per the status quo, and Steve divulges that yes, he is going on a date, with Emma. Yes, the cute-nay-gorgeous veterinarian. That’s right. Danny has some trouble believing him after how bad he’s been at this dating game until now, so Steve asks Alexa for help, and apparently women really do fall at Steve’s feet, because Alexa dutifully recites an 8 p.m. appointment at a restaurant that evening with Emma Okino.

Traitor.

*

###### 3\. 

The third time, Danny is in the kitchen first. He’s cutting an apple into pieces with a vague notion of maybe making a fruit salad from stuff that’s in the fridge and pantry when Steve enters, very briefly pauses upon seeing him there, and then deposits the towel, shirt and iron he’s carrying on the small kitchen island anyway. He sets up what he needs and Danny is instantly both amused and annoyed in a worryingly Pavlovian way.

He abandons his dreams of fruit salad in favor of hopping up on the counter again and obnoxiously eating his apple slices while he watches Steve at work. It’s the kind of thing that promises to be far more interesting than pouring grapes and pineapple in a bowl. “So which one is it this time?”

Steve doesn’t look up from his intense ironing. “Emma.” There’s the briefest of pauses before he adds, “Probably.” 

Danny lets out a bark of laughter. He’s not sure if he really thinks it’s funny, or he’s just appalled. “You don’t _remember_?”

That makes Steve look up. Danny expects Alexa to be called on again or something of a similar nature, but Steve just says, “Of course I remember.”

“So then what?” This is starting to remind Danny of the first time he caught Steve ironing for Brooke, when getting information out of him was like pulling teeth. It makes much less sense this time, because Danny already knows all about the status of Steve’s current dating life.

Or so he thinks. “On my last date with Emma, we ran into Brooke.” 

“Ah.” Danny’s laugh comes easier this time. He knows now that it’s at Steve’s expense instead of any of the women Steve is playing. “I bet that wasn’t fun. Who got mad?”

“Nobody.” Steve puts down his iron, glances up with one eye, repositions the shirt and gets back to work. “They both knew I was dating other people. They are, too.”

It both lifts a weight from Danny’s chest and tips his world a little sideways to know that, but Steve’s not done pushing the entire globe yet.

“So they hit it off, and they’ve been talking a bit, and now Brooke might be joining me and Emma for drinks tonight.”

“Okay,” Danny says, confused, and then his brain makes the extremely simple connection it for some reason missed on the first pass over this information, and he has considerable trouble keeping his jaw from hitting the floor. “Both? At the same time? You just, just-” He waves a hand in Steve’s direction, a little frantically. “Just did your sad and polite and handsome routine with two women at once and stumbled your way into a threesome?”

“Maybe,” Steve reminds him. “Not sure yet.”

“You said _probably_ a moment ago.”

Steve gives a little head tilt of acknowledgment. “We’re still ironing out the details,” he says, and glances up from his work out of the corner of his eye again, but expectantly now, like Danny is supposed to have some kind of response to that.

Danny, for his part, is experiencing a lot of different things in response, but it seems safest to give Steve what he’s looking for. “You’re making puns,” he concludes, which makes Steve grin down at the stupid shirt. “You’re making ironing puns while ironing your shirt for your probable threesome with two very beautiful women. This is okay. This is totally not making me green with jealousy.”

“Is it?”

“No. I just told you it wasn’t. Is there something wrong with your hearing?”

Steve puts the iron down. He keeps his hand on it, but all of his attention is seemingly redirected into squinting at Danny. “Do you have a problem with my plans for tonight? Be honest.”

“No,” Danny lies, again. “Why would I?” And that’s a good question, actually. Why does he? Why does he, in theory, want Steve to have a happy and vibrant dating life, but in actual fact it keeps bugging him any time he hears anything about it, and not just because he’s currently miserably single himself?

Steve doesn’t ask any of those follow-up questions. He takes Danny’s denial as a satisfying answer and goes back to finishing up his task, leaving Danny to realize the last piece of apple is already gone and there’s nothing left for him to do except watch Steve iron a shirt with a queasy gut.

*

###### 4\. 

Danny is on the couch, on the phone with his mother back in Jersey, when he watches Steve pass by with what appears to be a freshly washed shirt in his hands. He asks his mom to put on his dad, the one person in the family who doesn’t know how to ramble on incessantly, and a minute later he’s following Steve into the kitchen. He doesn’t even come up with an excuse, but just takes his spot on the counter. “So. Brooke, Emma or both?”

Similar to Danny’s lack of pretense, Steve doesn’t try to delay giving a clear answer this time. “The last one.”

“Ah, I see. So that worked out for you, then?” He hasn’t been able to bring himself to ask, even after he spent an inordinate amount of time trying to decipher every little thing Steve did the next day, like there would be clues hidden in the way Steve poured his cereal or how often he called Eddie a good boy. As far as Danny has been able to tell, Steve smiled no more or less than normal. Those very early days in their friendship where a suddenly madly grinning Steve meant Catherine was in town seem to be long past.

“Yeah,” Steve says, and even now his face is smiling but too mild to give away anything specific. “I guess it did.”

Danny watches as Steve irons peacefully, like butter wouldn’t melt. It should. The iron is hot enough for sure. “I can’t believe you,” Danny says, after a long moment of feeling strangely ignored.

That, finally, makes Steve grin. “I mean, to be fair, you kind of started it.”

“Excuse me?” Danny feels he’s well within his rights to question this frankly baffling claim. “I refuse to take responsibility here. I set you up with Brooke and pushed you at Emma _separately_ , so you’d have a choice, not so you’d form a little fanclub.”

“They’re not my fanclub,” Steve says. It’s good to hear him sound sure about that. “Also, I wasn’t saying you _did_ anything. At least not, you know, intentionally.” 

Danny wonders if Steve is being cryptic on purpose, or whether the amount of sex Steve has is leading to brain damage. Danny finds he doesn’t enjoy that thought from any angle, so he pushes it away by demanding, “Explain yourself.”

“I’m saying that after our recent Valentine’s movie night, in combination with your slightly insane behavior during my first date with Brooke and, apparently, that time you ran into her in the schoolyard recently while picking up Charlie-”

“Wow, hey,” Danny says, because he feels a need to interrupt, “at school? I was perfectly normal to her at school.”

“Giggly,” Steve says, pulling a face at his iron that makes _him_ look a little giggly while he says it. “That’s what she called it.”

“Slander,” Danny curses. Steve watches him like he’s patiently waiting for Danny to be done faking a mild outrage at something that might be a lot more true than Danny wants to admit to himself. He raises a hand at Steve. “Continue.”

“So as I was saying,” Steve says, “after all of-” He waves a hand vaguely in Danny’s direction. “-that, she pulled me aside and asked if I was interested in inviting you to, well, what ended up happening with Emma, essentially. So knowingly or not, you started this whole threesome thing.”

Steve is presenting this as an amusing anecdote, à la _this random college girl mistakenly thought we were her friend’s gay dads_ , except this time it’s _this woman I’m dating and who spent considerable time with us thought we might like to have sex_. Danny’s mind reels, but his mouth has no such problems. “So what did you say?”

“Hmm?” 

“To Brooke. What did you say?”

Steve gives a shrug. “No. I said no.”

Danny has some trouble getting enough air into his lungs, and oxygen is important for the human brain to work properly, which must be why he doesn’t do the smart thing and drops it. Keep his mouth shut, that’s all he has to do not to make it weird – ridiculously easy, really, for the average person. Pity that ten years with Steve dropkicked Danny out of the average person category. He, instead, hears himself ask, about his best friend deciding not to invite him into bed with the woman he’s dating, “Why?”

Steve looks up. Their eyes lock and it’s tingling down Danny’s spine and incredibly close to uncomfortable, but Danny doesn’t know how to look away. 

“I told her-” Steve falters, licks his lips. His eyes are too wide; he looks faintly surprised not only that Danny is asking, but that he’s answering. “I told her I wouldn’t be any good at sharing you.”

All of Danny’s breath rushes back in at once. “Okay. Right. Okay.”

Steve is watching him like he’s a skittish horse. “Okay?”

“Yeah.” Danny attempts to grin, but he encounters the opposite problem from before and can’t make himself look directly at Steve’s face anymore to see if he’s managing. He hops off the counter. “I think I gotta- I’m gonna go.”

“Go where?” Steve asks, but Danny is already out the kitchen door and halfway up the stairs, so it’s not all that hard to ignore both Steve and the concern in his voice.

*

###### 5\. 

The annoying thing about staying at Steve’s is that Junior got there way before him. Steve inhabits the master bedroom, Junior has the guestroom, and Danny is left to sleep wherever there’s space, with no settled spot for him. When he gets upstairs after making his cowardly escape from the kitchen, this means he’s faced with a choice where neither option is completely devoid of awkwardness. He almost hides out in Steve’s bedroom so he won’t displace Junior again, before he realizes just in time that Steve will need to go in there to get ready for his date, and that means Junior will just have to deal with coming home to a door that’s locked from the inside.

In the end, there’s no inconvenience to Junior, because he doesn’t come home before Danny’s phone battery gets dangerously low and his stomach starts rumbling. He put on the radio in Junior’s room intentionally, so he wouldn’t have to listen to the sounds of Steve moving through the house and the eventual closing of the front door and rumbling of a car engine. When he turns it off, the house is silent around him. Empty.

So when Danny enters the kitchen and there’s something huge moving, it’s fair to say he’s a little taken aback. He totally doesn’t jump or have a minor heart attack. It’s good he doesn’t, because it turns out to be Steve, back at it again with his iron. Even over the tumult of confusion and the feeling that he’s been caught, Danny wonders if this is the start of an addiction.

“Hey,” Steve says. He’s paused his ironing to watch Danny.

Danny clears his throat. “Hey.” He’s not going to give his ego the deathblow of running away from Steve of all people twice in one day, so he ventures further into the kitchen warily, walking around the island so he faces Steve. He’s not at ease enough to sit down on the counter, and his desire for food is temporarily forgotten. “What are you doing here?”

“It’s still my house,” Steve says drily. He finishes up with one sleeve and adjusts the placement of the shirt so he can work on the other. Danny watches the movement absently before doing a double take.

“That’s my shirt,” he points out, alarmed.

“So I canceled my date,” Steve says. He seems to plan on having this conversation in the most disjointed way possible, where he only gives straight answers to questions once Danny is already on to the next thing.

Danny hovers for a moment and then gives in and takes a seat on the counter. “And you thought, what, might as well do the rest of the laundry now that I have all this free time?”

“No.” Steve brushes a hand over the shoulder of the shirt, ostensibly to wipe away dust or a hair, but it looks awfully like a caress. “This is the only one I’m going to do.”

“My shirt. You’re ironing my-” It hits Danny all at once. He’s very glad he’s already sitting down. “Is this a grand gesture? Did you wait for me to come down so you could race to the kitchen and turn on the iron again to make the weirdest advance known to mankind? Through _ironing_?”

Steve is not perturbed by Danny making fun of him. It seems like he’s smiling at Danny’s shirt. “Say what you want, but you picked up on it. It’s working.”

Danny promptly drops the issue. They can argue about it again later, when Danny’s head is on right, but there are more pressing concerns. Specifically, concerns that pressed against Steve, presumably, at some point in the recent past. “So what about Brooke and Emma?”

Steve makes a last pass over the bottom corner of the front of the shirt. He inspects his work, sets the iron down and pulls the plug to let it cool off. “Not sure.” He checks the shirt is lying so that it’s least likely to get wrinkled again and finally rounds the kitchen island, ending up in front of Danny, reaching for the phone in his back pocket. He’s still playing at innocence. “I told them not to expect me anymore, but I think they might still go on that date with just the two of them. Do you want me to text them and ask?”

Danny leans over and snatches Steve’s phone out of his hand before Steve can even unlock it. “No.” Steve is suddenly grinning, so Danny puts the phone down on the counter and acts like he didn’t just overreact massively. “I mean, there’s no need. I’ll be seeing Brooke at school anyway.” Jesus Christ, there’s a thing to look forward to. (Remember when I set you up with my awesome single best friend and then acted like a psycho about it until he dumped you and your datemate for me? Yeah, fun times.)

“Sure,” Steve says, clearly just humoring Danny. That drops away when he asks, “So?”

“So?” Danny echoes. He’s struck by how small the kitchen is, and how close that puts Steve, no barriers between them anymore. With Danny sitting on the counter, they’re at an even height.

Steve shifts his weight, betraying nerves. “What do you think of my ironing?”

“Ironic,” Danny says, idiotically. His brain to mouth filter might need a trip to the shop. “Disturbingly seductive, too,” he adds, before Steve is forced to come up with an answer to receiving a pun in reply to his earnest question.

Steve doesn’t seem to mind Danny’s lameness. “Feel like putting on that shirt and letting me take you out to dinner?”

Danny considers it. He doesn’t consider it for long. “As long as you know I don’t share well, either.”

Steve’s shoulders drop and the lines in his face soften. “That’s what I was hoping for.” As Steve steps back to carefully lift Danny’s shirt from the towel, he looks genuinely, quietly happy for the first time in a long while. Danny sits on the counter and just watches him, struck speechless for maybe a moment too long, because Steve gently waves the shirt at him. “Well?”

Danny hops down and takes the offering, and while doing so mutters something about total impatience. He feels a little foolish but in a good way when he realizes, as Steve herds him out of the kitchen and he barely even pretends to complain, that while it might be an apt way to describe Steve, it’s just as accurate for his own heart.

*

“Oh, fuck you,” Steve laughs, much, much later that evening, when Danny peels him out of his shirt and unceremoniously drops it on the bedroom floor in a heap, wrinkles galore. 

“That’s the idea,” Danny quips. Steve opens his mouth like he wants to lodge a further protest, but he doesn’t get a chance before Danny kisses him again. 

Going by the mad grin Steve keeps sporting the next day, he doesn’t seem to hold a grudge.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!! If you enjoyed this, please consider A) leaving a comment and/or B) ironing seductively at your secret crush of almost a decade until he finally recognizes you for the handsome, housework-savvy modern man that you are and you live happily ever after.
> 
> I’m on Tumblr as [itwoodbeprefect](https://itwoodbeprefect.tumblr.com), or with my exclusively H50 (and mostly McDanno) sideblog as [five-wow](https://five-wow.tumblr.com).


End file.
